In the Bengali year 1255 (1849 ce), a young widow becomes pregnant during an (illicit) affair with her brother-in-law; he demands that her natal family eliminate the problem. During the abortion arranged by her mother and sister, Chandra dies. Her relatives are arrested and their statements are taken down. The depositions are later archived and anthologized with other documents at Viswabharati University.

“How is one to reclaim this document for history?” (Guha 1987: 138). In his compelling essay, “Chandra's Death,” Ranajit Guha poses the question integral to Subaltern Studies, the influential school of Indian historiography he helped to found in the early 1980s. The question encapsulates the collective's contestatory framework: how is Indian history to be written outside the historically dominant frameworks, first of colonialism and, later, of élite nationalism?